


The Conspiracy Job

by nostabbingwednesdays



Category: Leverage
Genre: Conspiracy Theories, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-13 20:42:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29657049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostabbingwednesdays/pseuds/nostabbingwednesdays
Summary: Roy Chappell. Kenneth Crane. Jacques Labert. Three identical, semi-famous men. They all have to be connected somehow, right? And what do they have to do with San Lorenzo?
Comments: 13
Kudos: 102





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by tags on a conspiracy theory board post I made on Tumblr: no-stabbing-wednesdays.tumblr.com/post/643887495126401024/some-online-sportscountry-music-fan-probably

“Oh, not again!”

The others, busy drawing up plans for their latest con, looked over at Hardison. 

“What is it?” Sophie asked.

He brought his display up on the large screen at the front of the room. 

“Someone’s just searched a bunch of Eliot’s old aliases, all at the same time.”

Parker frowned as she looked at the screen. “That doesn’t sound good.”

Eliot was on his feet immediately, concern clear on his face.

“Who is it? CIA? FBI? KGB? Mossad?”

“Give me a second,” Hardison said. “No, I don’t think so. They’re not being flagged on any databases. Someone’s just googling them.”

Eliot relaxed slightly and rolled his eyes. “It’s not those damn conspiracy forums, is it? I thought you got rid of those.”

“I did! They haven’t posted anything, they’re just looking. Oh, they’re here in Portland.”

Eliot tensed again at that, but Hardison shook his head.

“Relax, man. It’s a family house; a couple of dentists and a fifteen year old. If they post anything I’ll take it down; nothing to worry about.”

On the other side of Portland, Julia stepped into her friend Marcie’s bedroom and her eyes widened as she took in the scene before her. Marcie was connecting red threads between grainy, printed-out images on her corkboard and empty bottles of Gatorade littered the desk.

“You have to cool it with this, dude.”

Marcie turned to face her, her hair a mess and her eyes red from lack of sleep, and Julia sighed.

“You look like freaking Charlie Kelly!”

“There’s something here, Jules. I’m sure of it.”

“It’s a couple of athletes and a singer who happen to look similar. It’s hardly the scoop of the century.”

“Look similar? Look similar? Julia, they are completely identical! There are exactly three possibilities.” She held up three fingers in her friend’s face as she counted them off. “Triplets, clones or one ridiculously talented guy.”

“Okaaay, and which one do you think it is?”

“I don’t know,” Marcie answered, turning back to her board. “Triplets? Why would they have different names and hide it? One guy? He’d have to be able to sing and play guitar, baseball and hockey. Why wouldn’t you own up to having that kind of talent? Why go to different places with different names? Clones? I’m leaning clones.”

“Clones? Come on, Marcie.” 

“It’s the most logical explanation.”

“You think someone cloned a human being just to create a one-hit-wonder country singer and some short lived athletes?”

Marcie shrugged. “It could be a trial run or an experiment or something. And you remember that anything I ever said on the forums would mysteriously vanish? I went to look after Jacques Labert turned up and every single forum post was gone! Every one! Doesn’t that sound like a government conspiracy to you?”

“It’s weird,” Julia admitted. “But I think you might be taking this a little too far. If the government were making clones, why would they let them get famous so people could discover it?”

“But they weren’t that famous. Think about it, what were the chances that someone would connect them? There were only ever a couple of us posting on the forums. If I hadn’t happened to be visiting my uncle in Palmerston when Roy Chappell was playing and then gone to Saddle and Spurs for my birthday, I’d never have known.” 

Her eyes widened as a horrifying thought occurred to her. “Then Jacques Labert turned up in _my_ city! What if _I’m_ the connection?”

She swung back to the board and began to write her own name. Julia grabbed her hand.

“Marcie! You’re not the center of a government conspiracy! Besides, who’s this fourth guy again?” She asked, tapping one of the photos in the corner. “You didn’t have anything to do with him, did you?”

“No,” Marcie conceded. “And I told you about him, remember? He’s an animal rights activist who was on the news in San Lorenzo a couple of years ago, talking about dog fights in the Presidential Palace. _And_ he’s Canadian. That’s why it’s so exciting that, after almost two years of nothing new, Jacques Labert, Canadian hockey player, suddenly appears. Was the guy on the news Jacques Labert? If there really is more than one of them in the first place!”

Julia grimaced, increasingly worried about Marcie’s obsession with this wild conspiracy. “He was on the news where?”

“San Lorenzo. It’s this tiny European country. Here look.” Marcie sat at her desk, tapped the name into Google and turned her laptop towards Julia. 

Julia scrolled through a few pictures of the idyllic Mediterranean island, then stopped suddenly and pointed at one of them. 

“Wait, who’s that?”

“Oh, that’s Rebecca Ibañez. It’s a tragic story,” Marcie explained, as she clicked on the link and showed her some clearer pictures. “A couple of years ago, the same time maybe-Jacques Labert was there, there was an election and her fiancé won. But, just as the results were announced, supporters of the former president tried to assassinate him and Rebecca stepped in front and took the bullet for him.”

“She was assassinated?”

“Yes, isn’t it awful?”

Julia shook her head. “She can’t have been.”

“What?”

“She’s my brother Zachary’s acting teacher.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Yeah, I went to see his play last week and I met her. Her name’s Sophie Devereaux and she’s definitely not dead.”

Marcie looked at her in amazement, a grin breaking out across her face. “And she was in San Lorenzo at the same time as Jacques-Roy-Kenneth! There might be even more to this than I thought!”

Julia, almost as invested as Marcie now that her brother’s odd director was mixed up in this, pulled up a chair and looked on excitedly as her friend brought up another google search. 

Back at the Brewpub, the crew were working out the kinks in their plan while waiting for any sign of the internet sleuth trying to share their theories about Eliot’s multiple identities.

When the computer pinged again, they all turned to see which of his aliases had been flagged this time, only for their eyes to widen in horror as the search term flashed on the screen.

“ _Rebecca Ibañez_ ” “ _Sophie Devereaux_ ”

Sophie gave a gasp that almost turned into a choke. “Wha- wha- what?”

Eliot turned to Hardison, furious. “Oh sure, just dentists and a teenager! Fix. This.”

“I’m trying!” Hardison said. “I can’t find any connections to anything. They look clean.”

“Then look harder!”

Wait, I have something. It’s the kid’s computer.”

“Who’s the kid?” Nate asked.

Hardison pulled up a Facebook page. “Marcie Taylor. She’s a sophomore. She used to post on those stupid Eliot forums that I had to take down every week after Memphis. It was pretty harmless, but I’ve no idea why she’s suddenly looking at Sophie’s aliases.”

He scrolled down the page looking for any kind of hint, when Sophie called out to him to stop.

“Who’s that with her? She looks familiar.”

A few more clicks and Hardison had a name.

“Julia Gutmann. She’s in the same class.”

Gutmann?” Sophie groaned. “I know why she’s familiar. That’s Zachary’s little sister.”

“Zachary? Your acting student Zachary?” Nate asked disbelievingly.

“Yes, she came to our play last week.”

Nate shook his head. “I told you to use an alias at that theater.”

“But I wanted to do this as me,” Sophie argued.

Eliot turned back to Hardison. “So, let me get this straight. The aliases and digital trail that you set up to be uncrackable by international governmental organizations are about to be blown apart by a couple of high schoolers?”

Hardison glowered at him. “They’re only looking at old aliases and they were all burnt when we had to leave Boston anyway. It’s not that bad.”

“Sophie’s still using Sophie,” Eliot argued, nearly yelling now. “And I was only just Jacques Labert and in this city. Now they’ve tied me and her together. How did they even do that? That’s way more than some fifteen year old girls should be able to accomplish on Google.”

“Okay, okay. Don’t panic. They were looking at photos of San Lorenzo. That’s how they found a picture of Sophie."

Sophie glared at him.

"Hey!" he protested. "You're the one who jumped in front of the cameras! I can't control the entire internet you know, and I think the people of San Lorenzo would have noticed if every image of their martyred heroine suddenly vanished.

"It’s just bad luck that Julia had met you. But why were they looking at…” Hardison groaned. “They found that video of Eliot and the puppy somehow.”

“Why didn’t you take that down?” Eliot snapped.

“It’s a thirty second feature on the news from two years ago in a country smaller than Iceland! It wasn’t my top priority!”

“Dammit, Hardison!”

“So, our cover’s going to get blown by _kids_?” Parker asked, incredulously. 

“No,” Nate insisted. “Well, maybe. But we can manage this. Hardison, don't let them post anything. Sophie, call Zachary. Let’s go steal ourselves some silence.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was just going to be a one-shot, but I had a lot of fun writing it and people seemed to enjoy it so have a chapter 2! Also, please note I know nothing about computers so, if something sounds wrong, it almost definitely is!

Sophie drove Lucille across Portland at break-neck speeds, while Parker and Eliot watched Hardison nervously in the back. He was sweating as his fingers flew across the keyboard and every few moments he let out a noise that was somewhere between a groan and a whimper. 

“You okay, man?” Eliot asked at last.

“No,” Hardison responded through clenched teeth. “These kids… they’re… I can’t… I don’t…”

“Dammit Hardison, breathe!” Eliot said, his brow furrowing in concern. “It’s two fifteen year old girls. You’re pretty much the best hacker on the planet. You can stop them.”

“You’d think,” Hardison muttered, slamming the keys with considerably more force than was needed. 

“Can’t you?” Parker asked, surprised. “I mean they’re just kids.”

“I was just a kid when I started this,” Hardison replied, not looking up from his computer. “And they’re good. They’re getting through a lot of my stuff and, when they can’t, they’re just going around it somehow and finding things in these bizarre places.”

“What?”

“Ute-damn-Austgatner.”

Parker scrunched up her face in confusion. “Was that English?”   
  
“Remember when we stole a mountain? The first time? I made Sophie an identity based on this Swiss luger, Ute Austgatner. She found the pictures where I swapped her face with Sophie’s and she was, uh, not that happy. She posted them a few places complaining about it and I thought I got them all down but she must have posted more. I wasn’t really checking.”

“Why not?” Eliot demanded and Hardison looked up to glare at him.

“It was four years ago and it’s the _luge_.” 

“Okay, fair enough. No one really cares about the luge.”

“I checked back through and wiped every picture Ute put on her luge message boards and set up firewalls the NSA would struggle to crack if they wanted to find them.”

“They hacked your firewalls?”

“Nope. Turns out at least one person cares about the luge. The person who runs the blog at fyeahluge.tumblr.com. They had all the pictures of Sophie buried back in their archive and somehow these kids found them, but none of them came up when I was sweeping the  _ entire internet _ for them.”

“Okay, so they’ve connected three of Sophie’s identities together,” Eliot said, but Hardison shook his head.

“Four. They found Clarissa DuBois on Tumblr too. Apparently, she’s a meme.”

“Okay,” Nate sighed. “Four identities. We can work with this. Here’s the plan. We just tell them that-”

“Wait. Now it’s five.”

“Five!” Sophie nearly shrieked from the front. “Hardison, no-one outside the four of you and Sterling knows that many of my identities! How did this happen?”

“Marcie just sent Sophie’s pictures to her cousin Jane in Massachusetts and told her what they found. Guess what middle school Jane went to?”

Eliot grimaced. “Not…”

“Dalton Academy. The one we stole. She recognized Sophie as, ‘this crazy teacher we had for like a week who made us sing at the science fair.’ And oh great. Now she has Eliot’s pictures and has identified him as, ‘kinda scary dude who let us beat him up in gym class’.”

“Okay,” Nate repeated. “They know five of Sophie’s identities and five of Eliot’s and now they can connect the two of them together in two different places. So…” 

He paused for a long moment.

“So, we’re screwed,” Parker supplied.   
  
“Pretty much, yeah.”

* * *

  
Julia took a gulp of her gatorade as she connected another thread. Their conspiracy board had blown up since discovering the second clone/triplet mystery and it now stretched beyond Marcie’s corkboard and onto her wall. 

“Okay,” she said, stepping back to observe the complex web. “So we know their identities or clones or whatever have been linked at least twice. Once in San Lorenzo and once at Dalton Academy. So, what’s the connection?”

“Jane said they showed up with this even weirder principle just after some of the parents stole money from the school. Then, they vanished the day after they were caught.”

Julia nodded. “And in San Lorenzo they were both there during the Vittori election. I’ve been reading about it and it was a huge deal. It utterly transformed San Lorenzo’s reputation and human rights record.”

“So, what? Are they spies?”

Julia wrote down the theory, but then frowned. “Dalton Academy seems too small for international spies.”

“Maybe,” Marcie agreed. “But if not that, then what?”

Julia shrugged. “I don’t know yet. I say we keep digging. We’ve found five identities using each of these faces; two connected to each other. I bet there’s more.”

“Agreed,” Marcie said. “See, I told you I was on to something big.”

They worked in silence for a few more minutes, scouring the internet for any trace of the mysterious duo, until the doorbell rang. Julia glanced out the window.

“That’s Zachary’s car,” she said, confused. “I told him I was staying here for dinner. I’ll go see what he wants.”

Marcie nodded, engrossed in a possible lead concerning Slovenian royalty, as Julia went downstairs and opened the door.

“Hey, Zach. What’s up? I said that I was…” 

She trailed off in horror as she noticed that her brother was not alone.

“Miss. Devereaux said she and her friends wanted to speak to you about something,” Zachary explained.

Julia took a step back, her mouth opening and closing, but rendered silent by sheer terror. 

“Hello, Julia,” Miss. Devereaux began, and this was enough to spring her into action. She slammed the door in their faces, locked it and then bolted up the stairs. 

She burst into Marcie’s room in a frenzy. 

“They’re here!”

“What? Who’s here?”

“Them!” Julia cried, gesturing wildly towards the pictures adorning the wall. “They must be spies! They know we’re onto them and now they’ve come to kill us.”

Saying this, Julia dove under the bed while Marcie frowned in bewilderment. 

“Julia,” she said, slowly. “I think you’re being paranoid.”

“ _I’m_ being paranoid?” Julia squealed in outrage, and Marcie rolled her eyes.

“Maybe you were just scared and thought it was them?” she suggested. 

“We’ve been staring at their faces all day,” Julia argued. “I think I recognize them. Look out the window if you don’t believe me.”

Marcie did as she said. At first, she could only see the tops of heads, but then one of them turned around and she gasped as she met the unmistakable blue eyes of Kenneth-Roy-Jacques. 

A moment later, she was next to Marcie under the bed.

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit! What do we do?”

“I don’t know,” Julia wailed. 

They could hear a commotion downstairs and Marcie gulped. 

“I think they’re breaking in.”

“This is  _ not  _ how I wanted to die,” Julia moaned and Marcie shook her by the shoulder. 

“Snap out of it, we’re not going to die. We need a weapon,” she declared, sliding out from under the bed. “Come on!”

Marcie’s room did not offer much in the way of weaponry but, by the time they could hear footsteps on the stairs, they were armed with a lamp and a hefty Geometry textbook.

Marcie tightened her grip on the lamp as they heard a knock on the door.

“Hello? Julia? Marcie? We didn’t mean to scare you. We just want to talk. Can we come in?”

They exchanged a terrified glance, but neither replied.

“Look, your brother’s with us,” the voice continued, and then they heard Zachary.

“Julia? What’s wrong? Are you okay? They just want to talk to you.”

They remained silent and then the first voice spoke again. 

“We’re coming in. I promise we’re not going to hurt you.”

The next few seconds passed in a blur. The moment the door opened, they charged and, to their own amazement almost as much as that of the others, Kenneth-Roy-Jacques soon lay unconscious at their feet.

Marcie brandished her lamp at his shocked companions. “Stay back.”

“This is a low day for us,” the blonde woman beside possibly-Sophie Devereaux observed. “They out-hacked our hacker and now they’ve knocked out our hitter.”


End file.
